On Tue, 24 Aug 2021, Tom Stepleton via cctalk wrote:
Hello,
For the sake of illustration to folks who are not necessarily used to
thinking about what computers do at the machine code level, I'm interested
in collecting examples of single instructions for any CPU architecture that
are unusually prolific in one way or another. This request is highly
underconstrained, so I have to rely on peoples' good taste to determine
what counts as "interesting" here. Perhaps a whole lot of different kinds
of work or lots of different resources accessed is what I'm after. I expect
these kinds of "busy" instructions were more common in architectures that
are now less common, so perhaps this list is a good place to ask.
Does a virtual machine count?
The BCPL compiler outputs code in few formats, one is called CINTCODE -
Compact Intermediate Code. This is a bytecode designed to be interpreted
by a suitable interpreter running on real hardware - in the way other
bytecode systems work.
It has a switch instruction. Actually, it has 2 - one is a linear search
and one a binary chop. This is the definition of the binary chop one
(because linear is too easy)
SWB filler n dlab K1 L1 . . . Kn Ln
This instruction is used when the range of case constants is too large for
SWL to be economical. It performs the jump using a binary chop strategy.
The quantities n, dlab, K1 to Kn and L1 to Ln are 16 bit half words
aligned on 16 bit boundaries by the option filler byte. This instruction
successively tests A with the case constants in the balanced binary tree
given in the instruction. The tree is structured in a way similar to that
used in heapsort with the children of the node at position i at positions
2i and 2i + 1. References to nodes beyond n are treated as null pointers.
Within this tree, Ki is greater than all case constants in the tree rooted
at position 2i, and less than those in the tree at 2i + 1. The search
starts at position 1 and continues until a matching case constant is found
or a null pointer is reached. If A is equal to some Ki then PC is set
using the resolving half word Li , otherwise it uses the resolving half
word dlab to jump to the default label. See Section 9.1.3 for details on
how resolving half words are interpreted.
Obviously it needs the compiler to output the right stuff, but there it is
and I won't embarass myself with my implementation of it in 65c816
assembly code..
Gordon
